Mark Zuckerberg Lives Vicarious-ly With Investment In AI Company

Facebook Co-Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg participated in a $40 million funding round in Vicarious, which describes itself as “a secretive artificial-intelligence company,” according to The Wall Street Journal’s Digits blog.

A Facebook spokesperson told Digits Zuckerberg’s investment in Vicarious is personal, and did not indicate the potential use of Vicarious’ software by the social network.

Facebook Co-Founder Dustin Moskovitz also invested $15 million in Vicarious in 2012, according to Digits.

Vicarious described its mission on its website:

Vicarious is developing machine-learning software based on the computational principles of the human brain. Our first technology is a visual perception system that interprets the contents of photographs and videos in a manner similar to humans. Powering this technology is a new computational paradigm we call the Recursive Cortical Network.

And Co-Founder Scott Phoenix told Digits:

You have a computer that thinks like a person, except it doesn’t have to eat or sleep.

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